After 6 months, 3 shows, nearly 50 cast and crew, over 1,000 audience members and endless cups of tea, we at Devious Theatre have completed our residency in Kilkenny Arts Office.

It’s been an amazing, fantastic and hugely enjoyable ride and we’ve loved every second of it. It has really helped push us as a company and given us a platform from which we can engage with the next few years of our work.

The get out of No. 76 was a tough mistress and we were very sad to be packing, painting and rebuilding. But it was made all the sweeter by the news that we’ve acquired our own fulltime base in The Maltings off James Street. So we won’t be returning to our old homeless, guerrilla ways!

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Mary Butler, Niamh Finn and Kilkenny Co. Council for all the amazing support and opportunities that they’ve given us over not just the last 6 months but the past few years. We couldn’t have done this without ye.

As we hit the sixth night of Smitten – the longest run of a production I’ve ever been involved in on stage (well, Shifting was a six night straight run but I had the pleasure of teching the show instead) – we’re issuing a final call for tickets. Here’s the lowdown.

We opened to a house of near 60 on Sunday night, and similar again on Monday night. Since Tuesday, we’ve been operating at capacity (of which is 70) though with some slight rearrangement of the seating across Wednesday and Thursday, we’ve been able to add a few more seats to the Arts Office, bringing us closer to 80.

The box office only has 70 tickets available per night. The online sales are capped at 10 per night (we’re still in the infancy of the online ticket management side of things). So, if you do your maths you’ll see that 70 + 10 = 80. We’ve suspended the online ticket sales for the show as we’ve hit the cap on Friday night (tonight) and Saturday night (the closing night). We’ve also hit the cap at the box office for tonight (Friday), so, here’s what we’re doing.

You call to the box office for a ticket for tonight / tomorrow night.

If we’re out of tickets, you’ll get added to a waiting list or advised of the returns queue.

Across the day we’re ringing everyone who has a reserved ticket but has not yet collected the ticket. Reserved tickets need to be collected 24 hours before the performance or they can be resold.

If someone tells us they can’t go, or they haven’t collected their ticket by 7:50, those tickets will be released to the returns queue on a first come, first served basis.

With doors opening at 7:30pm and seating from 7:40pm, if you wish to get in line for the returns for the show, we advise you to be there at 7:30pm.

Also, while we’ll be locking the doors by 8:05pm at the latest and latecomers will not be admitted until the interval, and only if they are valid ticket holders.

So to the near 300 people or so who have seen Smitten in Kilkenny already this week, we really hope that you’ve enjoyed the show. If you haven’t gotten your ticket yet and want in on the action, you’ll have to move quickly! Once the show finishes on Saturday, so too does our residency here at No. 76. For those of you who have tickets for tonight’s show, we’ll see you from 7:30pm and if you need any more persuading, check out this review from The Kilkenny Reporter.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be Smitten! With the show opening this coming Sunday night, we bring you a look at the cast in action and some of the activities going on behind the scenes as the set gets installed here at the Arts Office.

Tickets are available for each night next week by phoning the arts office on 056-7794138 or you can call us on the office mobile on 086-1048191. For those of you who would like to pick up your tickets in advance, stop by our online ticket sales where you can print your own 🙂

The tickets for Smitten have just arrived in No. 76 waiting to be sold to the public! They’re nice and pink and smaller than usual (we modelled them on the cinema tickets from the old Regent cinema here in Kilkenny) and they can be bought for the princely sum of €12.

However, if you buy tickets for the opening night on Sunday June 26th, they’ll only cost you the knock down price of €8.

As usual with our In The Future When All’s Well shows, there are only 70 tickets per night and like the last two shows, it is likely they will sell out quickly!

So why not pop into the Arts Office now and pick them up? Alternately, you can make a booking with Niamh on 056 – 7794138.

Smitten runs from Sunday June 26th – Saturday July 2nd at 8pm nightly.

Smitten is the first time we’ve restaged a show in our 5 years of existence. We always felt our first production of it, whilst adequate, wasn’t exactly the barn burner we wanted it to be. All puns intended, because it played in The Barn back in 2008 and it was putting the show on in such a fantastic, unique space that really made it the last time. We only ended up having 5 weeks rehearsal off the back of Trainspotting, the script itself needed more time and from a production perspective we were very overstretched.

A promo image from the first version of Smitten in 2008.

That being said, it sold out every night and people said some really nice things about it. We just knew ourselves that we could do a better version of the show. And I knew myself I could write a better version of the show.

When the residency here in the Arts Office came up, we knew Smitten would be the right play to explore the themes of the residency. The play itself is about growing up, finding your feet in life, deciding whether to stay or go and embracing reality.

I worked on the script a lot throughout 2010 and again during the first few months of the residency (whenever we had a spare minute) and it’s been kicked into shape. Better shape I think.

The major changes are that I’ve re envisaged the play as a musical. Well, it’s not even so much a re envisaging as it is a reintegrating. The musical element of the story (introduced by the musical obsessed Daffney Molloy character) was there in my original script but when the first version went into production everything ended up getting downscaled due to time and production constraints until we were eventually left with a play that had some very light musical elements. The main thrust of Smitten is the contrast between the magical projections you have of your life when you’re older and how mundane real life could be. And musicals were always the most interesting way for me to explore that. What better illustrates the differences between fantasy and reality than jumping into song and dance at random moments when the emotion overpowered you?

I’ve also streamlined the play in terms of characters (we’ve chopped out 3) and put the focus more so on one main character than the ‘interlinked vignettes’ style of the first version.

So it’s got more narrative thrust, it’s got more dancing, it’s got more singing and it’s in a completely different space. We hope that the new version of it really does the idea justice and I really hope that it does the cast justice (most of them are the same!).

Tickets are still on sale at tickets.devioustheatre.com and you can get them now! Smitten plays the Arts Office from June 26th – July 2nd.

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Art at No. 76

The aim and focus of the Art Residency at No. 76 is to enable the successful applicant to research and develop their practice.
Other aims of the residency are to:
give insights into how and why artists create their work,
build relationships and further promote the Arts,
provide an awareness and further appreciation of the Arts,
cultivate and develop new audiences.
The Kilkenny Arts Office is part of ArtLinks.ie